Australian Economic Review最新文献

This article documents the considerable economic support provided to businesses by the Australian Government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that measures were associated with higher levels of business profitability and savings, a strong recovery in payroll jobs and wages, and mixed effects with respect to business dynamism. We formally evaluate the SME Cashflow Boost, finding costs per job-year saved in the vicinity of $72–83,000 ($US51–59,000) over its first year, implying between 400 and 500,000 job-years saved over this period. Combined with results from previous studies, this suggests between 1.1 and 1.3 million job-years were saved by the SME Cashflow Boost and JobKeeper Payment over their respective first years post-announcement.

Society is facing significant environmental challenges. The effects of climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation are being increasingly felt worldwide. In recent years, researchers have attempted to adapt neoclassical and endogenous growth theory to account for constraints imposed by scarce natural resources. In this article, we review where, and how, researchers tend to incorporate natural resources and natural capital into growth theory. We then outline areas and questions that remain unanswered, including how novel impact investing and the eroding trade-off between GDP and the environment affect growth theory.

During the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 the Australian federal government temporarily expanded the level of cash relief available to the working-age population through supplemental benefit payments, a wage subsidy and allowing lump sum withdrawals from private pensions. Here we examine the scope and direct distributional consequences of these measures. Two in five working-age Australians received at least one of these three forms of transfer over a 12-month window. The median recipient had close to half their pre-COVID-19 income ‘replaced’ by transfers. The programs interacted to create a two-tier welfare safety net that put in place a poverty-alleviating income floor for workers in low-earning occupations and those on unemployment benefits, and provided job certainty and greater direct income support to those with higher incomes. Aggregate weekly incomes were higher during the initial period of COVID-19 than they were pre-COVID-19. Descriptive exercises, such as this, do not provide information about the ‘impact’ of pandemic policies and are limited to what they directly measure. That noted, we raise an important question for decision-makers facing future shocks: at what point is there ‘too much of a good thing’ with crisis cash transfers?

Australia's Privacy Act 1988 is under review with a view to bringing Australia's privacy laws into the digital era, more in line with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This article discusses how the GDPR can be refined and standardised to be more effective in protecting privacy in the digital era while not adversely affecting the digital economy that relies heavily on data. We argue that an ideal data policy should be informative and transparent about potential privacy costs while giving consumers a menu of opt-in choices into which they can self-select.

This article investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the long-term economic growth of South Africa. We embed an epidemiological model in a modified Solow–Swan model and explore various channels such as morbidity, mortality, unemployment, loss of school days and capital accumulation. We demonstrate that COVID-19 will lower the average annual growth rate of GDP per capita of South Africa by 0.07 percentage points in the next four decades, a 25 per cent decline relative to the no-COVID benchmark. We show that human capital losses due to school closures account for more than half of the economic slowdown.

Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, this article considers the longer-lasting economic impacts on the Australian workforce through a gender lens. Using Australian Bureau of Statistics data, it analyses changes in employment, earnings and educational participation relative to the pre-pandemic trends that were predicted to have otherwise occurred. Despite women's employment moving back towards pre-pandemic levels more rapidly than men's, the pandemic also saw a widening of the gender gap in earnings and a larger fall in women's educational participation. This paper highlights the need for ongoing monitoring of labour market indicators through a gender lens to inform more responsive policy design.

We present details of the design and implementation of the 2020–2021 JobKeeper program and review the literature on its impacts. JobKeeper stimulated the macroeconomy and restrained job loss in the downturn. But because the program was not narrowly targeted, the cost per job saved was high and the impact most likely regressive. However, it would not have been possible to devise and implement a more targeted program in the available time, and as it was, JobKeeper was arguably implemented later than needed for maximum effectiveness. We therefore recommend that Australia consider establishing a short-time work program for use in future recessions.

This article is aimed at undergraduate and graduate economics students, and public sector economists, who are interested in inequality measurement. It examines the use of the Atkinson inequality measure to compare income distributions. A major feature of this measure is that distributional value judgements are made explicit, via the use of a particular form of social welfare function. Emphasis is given to the interpretation of changes in inequality and the role of the relative inequality aversion parameter, which reflects an important feature of those value judgements.

Record levels of domestic and global stimulus during the COVID-19 pandemic years helped to mitigate largely unparalleled downside risks. Post-COVID-19, inflation surged in Australia due to overseas factors such as the war in Ukraine, and domestic factors such as COVID-related backlogs in the construction sector. To constrain inflation, the Reserve Bank shifted to a phase of aggressive monetary policy tightening in 2022. There are, however, cost of living ramifications associated with tighter monetary policy. Looking forward, there is significant uncertainty about the rate at which inflation will normalise, and the spending response of consumers to higher interest rates.